More than 50 years ago, Miles Davis and his sextet walked into a church basement in midtown Manhattan that had been converted into a music studio. The album that emerged just nine hours later, Kind of Blue, not only changed jazz in a dramatic way, but also changed popular music forever, as Davis introduced a music suffused with a kind of mild exoticism that had its roots in Eastern philosophies. While the story of the making of the album has been told before, Richard Williams traces the deep influence that the album had on a wide range of musicians (John Cale, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, James Brown, Robert Fripp, Duane Allman) and demonstrates how such luminous music can usher in momentous changes throughout all parts of culture.